Word: tallin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...last great efflorescence of the modernist spirit that is still not fully known about. This was partly due to the cold war. The main reason, however, was repression inside the Soviet Union. The work of artists like Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova, Natalya Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Vladimir Tallin, Kasimir Malevich, Natan Altman, Naum Gabo and scores of others was a collectively ecstatic response to the possibilities of a new world, the Utopia that Lenin called "Marx plus electricity." It was international in range, drawing on the resources of the new movements in Italy and France-futurism and cubism-which...
Nevertheless, Tallin's project for a Monument to the Third International, 1920, which would have topped out at 1,400 ft., dwarfed the Eiffel Tower and given the U.S.S.R. the greatest industrial metaphor in the world, was a euphoric paean to the marriage of "objective" material-girders and glass-with dialectics The idea of a necessary link between the nature of modern art and the aims of socialism was everywhere. "Each part of a futurist picture," Natan Altman argued, "acquires meaning only through the interaction of all the other parts"; its task was not to depict, but to explain...
...years before he died at 27, lays no stress on its materials; it is a pure proposition of the kind of half religious ideal that was soon to be censored out of Russian art by Stalin. On the other hand, the work of Iwan Puni and Vladimir Tallin was virtually dialectical materialism transferred into art-"real materials," as Tatlin put it, possibly drawing on his own experience as a marine carpenter, "in real space." When Puni stuck a ham mer onto one of his reliefs, and a saw onto another, he did so to praise the world of work...
...early years of the revolution-was to construct a beauty that could not be found in nature. Only one metaphor was allowed to intrude into the garden of absolute form: that of the machine. The dynamics of manufacture supplied, for Russian constructivism, the prototype of revolution This permitted Tallin, Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and others to create, during the first years after the Soviet Revolution, the only radical art of the 20th century that meshed with radical politics. Tallin's unbuilt tower, the monument to the Third International, was greeted as transcending more bourgeois spectacles like the Eiffel Tower...
...Stalin squashed experimental art like a bug, the link between "revolutionary" art and revolutionary politics in Russia was closer than it has ever been in the West. The idealist abstract order of works like Lissitzky's Proun, 1919, was deeply connected to social visions of Utopia: when Tallin designed his extraordinary spiral tower as a monument of the revolulion, there was no doubt in his mind thai the appropriate language for radical politics was radical design. The energy of that period ran through the entire fabric of the Russian avantgarde, from Mayakovsky's poetry to Eisensiein...